3.25" Flying Crotalocephalus Trilobite - Rare Species

Flying Crotalocephalus Trilobite - Rare Species #244266

This is an impressive, 3.25" long Crotalocephalus trilobite that has been prepared so that it flies above the rock on a pillar of limestone. Not to be confused with the common Crotalocephalina trilobites from Morocco, this species of Crotalocephalus is quite rare, particularly larger examples like this.

The preparation on this example is exceptional and would have taken dozens of hours under high magnification to remove all of the hard limestone surrounding its shell. There is only about 1-2% restoration in total along a repaired crack running through the back of the thorax, and one pleural spine has been restored.

Trilobites were a very diverse group of extinct marine arthropods. They first appeared in the fossil record in the Early Cambrian (521 million years ago) and went extinct during the Permian mass extinction (250 million years ago). They were one of the most successful of the early animals on our planet: over 25,000 species have been described, filling nearly every evolutionary niche. Due in large part to their hard exoskeletons (shells), they left an excellent fossil record.

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